Let the people riot.

Condemning an innocent person to death would be the direct responsibility of the Judge, whereas the judge is not directly responsible for the actions of the protestors. Those protestors are behaving outside of the judicial system, and the judicial system may deal with them eventually, but their threat of violence should not be part of the decision-making process.

Caiaphas and his whole “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” thing shouldn’t really be seen as a role model for judges. Just sayin’.

If you were the judge, what would you do?

Drive a trolley into the rioters

This is even worse logically than the premise of the Trolley problem. You're basically reframing a terrorist or criminal holding a gun to a bystander's head and demanding something trying to say it'll be my fault the person dies if I don't give them whatever they ask for.

No. It's got nothing to do with me (or the judge). The criminals threatening violence are the bad people.

The only good "Trolley problem" rewrite I've heard is the crying baby and the hiding refugees. https://www.truthorfiction.com/crying-baby-ethics-question-causes-viral-controversy/

All the others are either too contrived (how did those people get in the trolley tracks? why is there no driver? why am I able to get to the lever or how do I know a fat man will detail the trolley?) Or it's just a terrorist blaming someone else for his actions. The crying baby one challenges me on a very deep level.

Executing an innocent person is never just. A judge of the justice system must be just above anything else like politics or outside consequences.

The judge does not "let the people riot". Saying it like that misleads into thinking so. The judge is not the active part in that. The rioters are the actors and can and must be brought to justice when they can/later.

It's not on the judge to weigh on outsiders and outside consequences. They must gather and assess the concern at hand concerning a person at hand. Outside factors are irrelevant. Influences onto the case may be relevant, but not the other way around.

If a judge and by consequence the justice system loses it's justice and fairness it loses all of its most important, primary, and possibly single responsibility and trust. Without a just justice system, it is bound to end up will all manner of corruption, arbitrariness, and secondary factors of no societal trust in a justice system (leading people to execute self-justice; what the example tried to evade in the first place).

A judge is to apply the law without bias. If the judge stops doing that, then they just become a dictator and are no judge.

State violence is always worse, less acceptable, than interpersonal violence. Moreover, the judge has no reasonable reassurance that her wrong action now will lead to a satisfactory outcome later; that is to say, she could execute an innocent and the rioters might still attack.

All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.

Moral responsibility initially lies in the people responsible for creating the situation. The rioters are responsible regardless of which choice is made because they are the ones creating the circumstance in which there is no option to avoid injustice. If you're the judge, you're not responsible for the rioters killing more than one person, however unfortunate that is. You would be responsible for knowingly killing a known innocent.

Likewise, with the trolley problem, regardless of what choice the operator makes, whoever tied up the people and put them on the tracks and whoever caused the trolley to barrel out of control is at least initially responsible.

If you must kill the one to save the many, then ceterus paribus, you kill the one. It's shit, it's always shit, but it's less-shit than not doing it.

And you never, ever pretend that it was actively good. It's not a vector sum. You've still killed someone, the score isn't +9, it's (+10, -1), and those are not the same thing. You bear the blood on your hands forever, you accept the mantle of killer and you do it anyway. That's a shit deal, but life throws you shit deals. If you ever try to paint yourself the hero for it, you're a killer and a fucking coward.

Kid going for a nuclear bomb trigger disguised as a teddy bear, you're 250 meters away and only have a sniper rifle: sorry honey, :bang:

You may have saved the city, but you still killed a kid, and you're supposed to feel shit about that. And if you don't, something is very very wrong with you.

But ceterus is rarely paribus, is the problem. Couching the problem in this particular formulation robs the problem of its purity, and now you're tying in externalities like what happens to your society when you put the force of law behind decisions like this - and whether there are knock-on effects that skew the balance.

What you've got here is a hostage situation with extra steps. They're ill-defined hostages with no specific identity or location, which prevents you from just sending in a SWAT team, and that gives you a clear choice: capitulate with their demands, or sacrifice the hostages outright.

For an individual to capitulate is likely the better choice, as they aren't likely to be in this situation again, and a one-off less-worse situation beats the alternative.

But for an institution like the justice system to capitulate is pretty much guaranteed to be the worse choice, as they're going to be involved in the great majority of hostage situations going forward, and a reputation for capitulating will invite many, many more such cases. That anticipated harm can easily be expected to far outweigh the harm of sacrificing one set of hostages, and so the only reasonable choice, shit though it is, is to be a hardass about them and sacrifice them.

Option 2. If innocent people die, it won't be by my hand.

Isn’t this just a ripoff of the magical realist story about the utopia being propped up a single boy being tortured in the basement? Or did that story come after?

It's actually an excellent illustration of the systems of ethics that different branches of the government operate under. The judicial is explicitly dentological. There is no place for anything else. It's the legislature that needs consequentialist and utilitarian perspectives.

As usual with variations of the trolley problem, there's a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the question to oversimplify a more complex question, which leads to weird results.

For example, I'm given perfect knowledge of a lot of future events. I know that the crowd will riot if I don't convict, and I know that any attempt made by myself or anyone else to reason with them will fail. I also know that people won't riot over convicting an innocent person. There are all sorts of social consequences that could result from my decision, people gaining or losing faith in the system, an effect on my own career and ability to make future decisons, setting a precedent of expanding state power, the possibility that closing the case would let the actual perpetrator run free and cause more problems, etc.

If you ask me to make all the assumptions necessary to frame in the same way as the original trolley problem, then my answer has to be the same (lose one to save five), but those assumptions cause the hypothetical to be utterly divorced from reality. The real answer is not to convict because you're not a psychic.

This is an interesting question. From Foot’s own neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalist perspective, I don’t think she would accept executing an innocent person.

Her account of the practical rationality of the Sudetenland farm boy who chose death over joining the Nazis seems to indicate her preference for avoiding participation in others’ evil acts.

Just as well, it seems to conflict with virtues such as courage (giving into fear of a riot), wisdom (abandoning the rule of law to placate a mob), justice (murdering an innocent person), and so on.

Execute everyone.

Just accuse the riot's leader of the crime. Riot is settled and a person is punished for orchestrating violence. Get 2 birds stoned at once

These sort of thought experiments are helpful to drive home the point that in creating public policy, sometimes you do need a way to quantify the value of human life, which gets to the ugly truth that we do value lives differently everyday in society. ER triage will save the sickest person first, all else being equal. But when things get swamped children often get prioritized up. We value young life more. The trolley problem forces the concept of assigning value to life and taking action based on that.

This second problem doesn't do so as cleanly. In my opinion, the right answer is to let them riot, but also alert the police and seek to mitigate the harm they cause. This problem feels less about the quantification of human life than about moral culpability of actions. The trolley is acting as it must die to physics. It isn't good or evil and has no agency. On the second problem, the rioters have agency, are choosing to do evil, and should be fought against.

Just my quick take though.

The answer is dependent on context I think.

In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.

The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.

In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.

i pick one of the rioters